In today's electronic commerce there has been a proliferation in the use of various types of credit, debit, identification and other types of authorization cards. For example, an average individual is likely to carry a driver's licence, several credit and/or debit cards, an identification card for access to a health club, an identification card to gain access to a place of employment and an access card to gain entry into a parking garage, among others. Furthermore, with advances in electronic commerce, smart cards are likely to replace paper and coin money resulting in an additional card for consumers to carry. Each of these cards typically incorporates a magnetic stripe or bar code to facilitate easy recognition of the card and to store various types of data. Although the use of these cards allow for easy and efficient electronic commerce, the number of such cards quickly becomes cumbersome and many individuals find carrying the large number of cards inconvenient.
Prior art magnetic stripe credit cards and the like have various limitations. For example, virtually all the prerecorded magnetic stripe cards that are currently in use are used for a single purpose. For example, a credit card or an identity card is generally used for just that purpose alone. In many instances, owners and users of these type of cards need to present several cards in order to maximize or complete a given transaction. Specifically, a discount card such as is used in certain supermarkets as well as the credit card to make the purchase must be both presented so as to obtain the discount.
Various solutions such as providing a sticker which can be placed on a credit card or the like have been suggested, however, these defeat the purpose of having an increased level of automation for check outs for example.
There are many instances whereby an individual, consumer, entity, organization, etc., would find it desirable to provide others with a secure, customized set of Id data that would facilitate a transaction and or event of a specific type. Additionally, the receiver of the data for the transaction may wish to provide complimenting and supplemental data back to the originator of the transaction and all such transactions being done in a digitized format to be interpreted, manipulated and/or displayed on Point-of sale transaction (POS) devices/computers both at the POS and remotely. Additionally, the process of initializing this secure transaction would be more flexible if the acceptors of the transaction could utilize a Magnetic stripe card that could combine a unique identifying code with the standard ISO data from other completely different financial or other card's magnetically striped data.
Accordingly, the inventor herein proposes a solution which is both cost efficient and time efficient and which allows the use of conventional types of magnetic stripe readers which are currently being used in most retail establishments. One embodiment of the present invention allows for a single swipe of the card through the magnetic strip reader to provide all the information in one pass. This can be accomplished by recording onto the conventional magnetic strip of the credit card, the desired data from multiple cards and other sources which are necessary to complete a chosen transaction. In particular, a secure, customized set of identification data may be used to facilitate a transaction or even of a specific type.